Marketing and the Techies

Bill Venners: The fourth reason you gave in your "Why I Love Python" keynote was,
"Marketing people are not involved."

Bruce Eckel: The Python venture is basically controlled by the
techies. We make decisions based on what's going to make the life of the
programmer easier. Even with C++, which was a standards committee, I
remember early decisions being based on worries about the existence of a body
of code which was a drop in the bucket relative to what we have now. But they
were saying, "We can't make this change in the language because we would
break all that existing code," which was basically trivial. We should have made
those changes at the time. That was sort of a marketing decision because many
of the people on the committee were representing companies who had vested
interests in C++ in some way or another.

Certainly people that come to the Python conferences often use Python within
companies. But I guess it's rarer that Python is the flagship programming
environment of any sizable company. They always end up using something else.
Because of that, the people who are coming, even if they are coming from a
company that's using Python actively, are typically more Python
enthusiasts than people worried about how Python
will affect the bottom line. Although now there is the Python Software
Foundation, and basically that's a way for companies to contribute to the
continuing development of Python and at least have the ear of the core Python
team. So in XP terms they would be customer representatives, I suppose,
although they don't have that much leverage. They have the ability to
communicate that much easier.

Next Week

Come back Monday, July 14 for Part IV of a conversation with
Elliotte Rusty Harold. I am now staggering
the publication of several interviews at once, to give the reader
variety. The next installment of this interview with Bruce Eckel
will appear in the near future.
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